The present invention is related to robotic control systems, and more particularly to the control of automated food preparation systems.
Many types of automated food preparation systems have been developed over the last 50 years, from sandwich-making conveyor belt lines (U.S. Pat. No. 4,483,242 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,768,857) to automatic rice cookers (U.S. Pat. No. 5,156,082) to automatic bread makers (U.S. Pat. No. 5,839,356) to more general-purpose food preparation systems capable of multiple food preparation tasks (U.S. Pat. No. 4,919,950, U.S. Pat. No. 5,018,438 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,172,328), however such systems typically require specific instructions designed for that particular system or family of systems to generate a particular type of food. One cannot simply take a standard recipe out of a cookbook or off a web site and use it with these systems without human intervention. In addition, the machine instructions necessary to make a particular dish vary from system to system, so a specialized instruction file for one system will not work with another system from a different manufacturer, and a recipe that requires the capabilities of multiple types of food preparation systems cannot be accommodated by the current state-of-art.